You love them and I love them more for it.

There are a few people in our family's life whose admiration of my children adds an extra coat of sparkle to them. They have a way of complementing me on my kids, of interacting with them and loving them that expands my love for them, like a balloon rising up into higher altitudes. [You saw that right? The father and son that sent an iPhone into space via weather balloon?]

One friend has told me how lovely Graham is so many times that I'll never hear that word again without thinking of my son at this age. Not something you hear often in reference to an energetic 5-year-old boy. But my God, he is lovely. And when I catch my breath in the marathon of keeping up with his childhood, I'm practically crushed with gratitude for him.

My best friend is living on the East Coast, and he's perfected the art of telling stories about my children. When I hear the anecdotes in his words, their spirits distilled into Pure Them without the dinnertime spill or the nightmare about piranhas that shredded our night's sleep to bits, I can hardly believe my luck to have such fantastic kids and such a great friends, who see my children's magic so easily.

Friends like these make it easier to tune myself towards the sort of perspective I want to have about raising children, instead of getting bogged down in logistics and temporary difficulties. They are my cure for bad parenting days.

I hope that every kid has someone who thinks they're the best kid in the world, who will think everything the child does, their successes and maybe more importantly their struggles are testaments to how they are becoming themselves, and to just who that might be exactly. I learned early on in parenting that others follow the way you regard your children. If you struggle to connect with them, others will see your child as distant. If you find your child exhausting, don't expect others to have more patience - they probably won't. You set the standards for how your child gets treated, and later on, the standards for what that child will allow in their own relationships. Your child will come to expect and believe he deserves whatever you dole out. Not at all terrifying, right?

Our culture places too much value on venting our emotions. I say this freely admitting that I am absolutely one who needs to talk things through to process them. Is venting the same as processing? I'm not sure. Venting seems like letting some air out before the whole thing pops - something that happens when you're so far gone that you can't do anything but tend to the emergency of the problems building up inside your already over-inflated self. It's just a release right? Does it accomplish anything else? I'm not sure it does. It's not a value judgement I'm making here, sometimes that's really where you are; once you get there, you really do have to deal with that pressure first. But what then? Wait until it gets to that level again and repeat?